I'm a therapist and that fascinates people because they think I carry secrets.

Today, 'fat' has become not a description of size but a moral category tainted with criticism and contempt.

Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.

I'd like to see much more understanding of emotional issues around hurt, abandonment, disappointment, longing, failure and shame, where they stem from and how they drive people and policies brought into public discourse.

The insistence that the commercialisation of the body is a fit subject for political discussion and intervention is well overdue.

Celebrity culture is something that pains me.

Fat is a way of saying no to powerlessness and self-denial.